INVESTIGATIONS
(See Cover) Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman was on the grill. What were his associations with Billie Sol Estes? Freeman shrugged, hopelessly and helplessly. He had, he told newsmen, met Estes once, briefly, when Estes was paying one of many visits to Agriculture Department headquarters in Washington. Said Freeman: "I might recognize him in pictures." Then he mustered up a bit of bitter humor: "I'm sure I'll never forget the name." The newsmen laughed.
But the Billie Sol Estes case was no laughing matter—to Freeman or anyone else. It was the case of a welfare-state Ponzi. It was a scandal that had already brought about the resignation or dismissal of four Kennedy Administration officials. It had politicians and bureaucrats of all degrees and of both parties shaking in their boots. It had set off investigations galore. It had called into question the whole administration of the mighty U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Last week's official line from the White House was that the worst was already over, that further investigations would not disclose any more facts that might embarrass the Administration. In fact, the worst might be still to come.
Important documents in the Estes case were carefully hidden from outside gaze.
The hefty Agriculture Department file on Estes was being guarded as if it contained plans for an anti-missile missile.
Down in Pecos, Texas, Federal Receiver Harry Moore, presiding over the ruins of the Estes empire, refused to let newsmen even peek at the "financial journal" in which Billie Sol had recorded his receipts and expenditures over the years. Until the full record was open to scrutiny, the Estes scandal was the hottest thing around.
According to President Kennedy, 76 FBI agents were working on the case.
Receiver Moore's office in Pecos was jammed with feds poring over Billie Sol's papers. "I have working in this office at the moment," said Moore, "six Senate investigators, five men from the FBI, and four auditors—and twelve more are on the way." In Washington, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations unanimously voted to hold a full-scale investigation of the Estes case, with public hearings to begin as soon as Chairman John McClellan sees fit, probably in June. In addition, a House Government Operations Subcommittee, newly supplied with a special $400,000 appropriation voted by the House, was undertaking its own investigation of Estes' involvements in federal farm programs. Under way in Texas were federal and state grand jury investigations, plus an inquiry by State Attorney General Will Wilson.
Arkansas' tough John McClellan promised that the Senate investigation would be "full, thorough and complete." With him in charge, it probably will be. A veteran of many messy investigations, including 1957-58's marathon inquiry into the Teamsters Union, McClellan ominously summed up the Estes case as "the darnedest mess I've ever seen." Precocious Deals. The man who made the mess is a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes who makes Dr. Jekyll seem almost wholesome. Billie Sol (pronounced "soul" in West Texas) never smoked or drank. He considered dancing immoral, often delivered sermons as a Church of Christ lay preacher. But he ruthlessly ruined